Well I hadn't gotten too far past the Midgar section when I stopped playing it since it was my friend's PS1. For whatever reason, didn't continue. But I did see him play bits of the game here or there, and I did see him do the whole finale. And obviously being a hardcore video game fan, it would be impossible for me to not see or hear about FFVII in the past 20 years as well...

And yeah, most of my time playing main Final Fantasy games was in the 2000s when they were remade on GBA. Also got to play some X and XII (again, on a PS2 that wasn't mine). I literally only got a PS3 (the only Playstation I've ever owned) like a year ago so...yeah.

Yeah you really did miss a lot then. Despite being massive, Midgar is a tiny portion of the overall game. Leaving Midgar is that point where you realise how huge a deal it is. You just assume at the start that the whole game will be set in Midgar.

@Dezzy To be fair, much of the game's size was an illusion. The towns were really just a handful of prerendered pictures and the actual places you could go (bar Midguard) were VERY limited. There's a reason why XIII was mostly hallways. There was just no way to put in tons of large towns AND have high-end visuals AND have a huge world in a game. Many JRPGs do things to cut down on as many assets as possible (Xenoblade X only has one city, Tales games usually have barebones overworlds, FFXV's open world in general and massive load times). The only game I can think of that has both a large world and many large towns is Skyrim and that's a game that only has about 6 enemy types and is loaded with stock animations.

Those pre-rendered backgrounds were handled in such a way that the size wasn't an “illusion“. And VII-IX had plenty of towns/ cities (I can't remember much about what I saw of X. XII wasn't lacking though).

@DarthNocturnal It doesn't change the fact that RPG developers were always trying to cut as many corners as possible. Square RPGs probably weren't the best example but keep in mind they're more the exception then the norm when it comes to budget. Most JRPGs are usually made on a low budget compared to most console games.

@Snaplocket Well I would say that Xenoblade 2 has a lot of huge cities (Well uh... yeah at least 4 that let you go into nooks and crannies and if you manage to jump to the roof, the roofs too). Although I guess it's not counted as high-end graphics eh.

@darkfenrir Xenoblade 2 is probably the only modern JRPG that managed to pull off that kind of scale like PS1 RPGS.

It was also released, like, 3 months ago.

In all seriousness, I expect to have at least a decent time with Final Fantasy XIII. I've already seen the "movie" online and the gameplay looks like it would be pretty fun and a nice change of pace from the norm.

@Snaplocket That's true. Recently I feel JRPG is slowly going back to the golden times, like, they are starting to shine again after so long being kinda... "average-y". XC2 kinda reminds me why I love JRPG so much...

I really should try FFXIII just to see why people are screeching about it :v but with so many new games it's hard to think of buying old ones... (oh well, I'll just go straight to FFXV)

@darkfenrir Aren't people really screechy about XV too? (I thought it was a 7/10 game imo) Also there were still plenty of good JRPGs for the past decade. (They were just mostly on handhelds which the Switch KINDA is)

@darkfenrir The only reason Xenoblade Chronicles ever became "high-profile" (if you can even call it that, and it's obvious that's the kind of game you're talking about) was due to Operation Rainfall and you know it. Whether you find them as good or not doesn't change the fact that several of my favorites (The World Ends With You, The Legend of Heroes Trials in the Sky/Trails of Cold Steel, Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, the Ys series, Pokemon Black/Y/and Moon, the list goes on) came out in the seventh and 8th generation and were all handheld titles (Trials of Cold Steel was developed for the Vita). TWEWY might just be one of my top five favorite games ever and that was a DS game.

@Snaplocket Well yeah, I do agree it becomes famous because of Operation Rainfall.

I do enjoy The World Ends With You a lot, as well as the Pokemon series (Haven't tried Cold Steel, and Trials in the Sky uh... the gameplay unfortunately turns me off before I can even get to the meat of the story, I really should try Ys though)

But yeah, I guess I feel that because I didn't look towards the PSP titles (Crisis Core, KH BBS, Legend of Heroes, Ys are all PSP / PSV Titles). Sorry for the whole feelings then.

@darkfenrir Eh... no hard feelings. I'll admit none of these games really got much attention due to their psp/ps vita origins. Most people played the home console ports of these games. I just wanted to make it clear that there was a lot of solid JRPGs released in the past decade and I always get kinda miffed whenever someone acts like as though JRPGs were mediocre ever since the PS2 days.

@Dezzy It was really more on the fact that the towns were really just pictures that weren't actually "there" and didn't have sprites/models. A style which honestly hasn't aged that well. It's not like Skyrim where you can enter every building and everything is fully rendered.

I don't really see a huge distinction. It's no different than 3D models that you can only view from 1 camera perspective.
I think the only thing stopping them from aging well is the really low resolution. They still look great if you play on a Vita.

About an hour into FF XIII. I actually like the story so far and it isn't that hard to follow nor does it take that long to read the datalog (which isn't mandatory in my opinion). The combat is interesting but is kinda dull until I finally get magic. That said, MAN does the game look beautiful.

Next Monday, on 26th February, a free playable demo for Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition will be available to download! It will be available on the FFXV Windows Edition Steam page and will contain the entirety of Chapter 1. Not only will you be able to fully explore the tutorial and enjoy the opening main quests but you will also be able to test your PC to see how well FFXV Windows Edition will run on it and how high you will be able to push the graphics options.

You'll be able to test play chapter 1 before thinking to purchase! I think this will be great (I pray my laptop's strong enough)